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Forget today, plan ahead now

By Andrew Graham (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-21 10:59

Perhaps you woke up this morning, looked in the mirror and thought, "Looking good!" and stepped out to meet the day with a spring in your step.

In which case, lucky you, make the most of it. Live it up, spend it while you can. The window of opportunity won't last long.

One day you'll wake up, look in the mirror and close your eyes at the thought, "Geez! Another day older", and with the heavy burden of the future weighing on your shoulders, your step will resemble more a kind of despondent shuffle.

Still, mustn't grumble. You should actually be rejoicing, because the sad fact is that things are only going to get a whole lot worse and one day you'll think that the sooner you meet your appointment with death, the better.

If you consider yourself miserable now, working as a wage slave so you can keep up the payments on your overpriced city apartment that is already falling apart and on a car that spends most of its time belching out fumes in a traffic jam, as you try to locate that illegal parking lot, well, you should see what the future holds in store.

Of course you want to live as long as you can. Who doesn't? If you manage to avoid contracting a debilitating disease or dementia after all, there are still a great many things you need to buy.

There is no way you are not going to make the most of all those creature comforts and luxuries that are now available in the shopping malls mushrooming throughout the city.

Unfortunately, however, unless you are rich, marry into money, or come into a large inheritance from some long-lost relative, you are about to hit a brick wall on your pell-mell trip down the highway to consumer heaven.

According to Zhong Wei, a professor at Beijing Normal University and a leading economist, a person will need to save the equivalent of 20 years of salary for retirement. He calculated that if a person retired in 2007, based on the average annual income for urban residents, they would need 275,000 to 500,000 yuan after retirement.

Even worse, if you take into account economic growth, income increases and inflation, he estimated urban people might need 3 million to 5 million yuan of savings if they retire in 2027.

And for Beijingers it gets even worse, as that was just the urban average in China.

For people in top-tier cities such as Beijing, he believes that even 10 million yuan will not be enough. There goes that holiday you were planning and the BMW convertible.

Instead of rejoicing at the thought of a long life, you should be drowning your sorrows at the nearest bar or, better yet, playing the lottery.

And it's not just your own future that's a problem. When you retire you will join the growing ranks of the elderly. The number of retirees in China is set to double between 2005 and 2015, and by mid-century it is estimated that retirees will comprise one-third of the population.

If you think it is bad enough now, looking after two parents and four grandchildren, the generations that follow you will in all probability be even more ill-equipped to do so than you are now.

Not to worry, you say, house prices will see you through after all your apartment's doubled in value in less than five years, and you can always invest in stocks. Yes, that's great in theory, so long as the economy doesn't go belly-up, of course.

However, it might be more practical to start downgrading your lifestyle instead: Get rid of the car, use the subway, get what you can for the apartment, rent somewhere outside the Sixth Ring Road and start saving.

Just remember to stuff it under the mattress, though. You never know about banks.